“It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“In vain the world unfolded before the eyes of Israel all its evil, all that was repulsive and abhorrent; deprivation, torture, and the enslavement of nations—nothing could shake his faith in the world, nor was the world identified with evil or sin in any way. The more they were oppressed, the more Jewish life burst forth with greater vigour. From their very downfall, they drew strength, rising again and again with renewed effort against the forces that seemed capable of driving them to despair of the world.”

— Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Amozeg

If there is any meaning to the term “collective trauma,” now is the time to examine it thoroughly, as it seems we are all deeply entrenched in it. We are not only referring to those specific individuals who have experienced personal trauma; even those who did not experience any personal trauma might feel that something fundamental has changed during and after the attacks of October 7th, 2023. The amalgamation of pure evil that was paraded before our eyes for days was something that, even though we knew it existed, we had a hard time imagining actually happening—let alone to so many people like us and just an hour’s drive away. These facts were bound to startle anyone’s mental wellbeing.

This crisis did not pass over the therapeutic and psychological communities, of course. In a conversation I had with some of my colleagues at the beginning of the war, an experienced trauma therapist shared, “Now that my patients and I share the same pain, I’ve run into difficulties I’ve never experienced before.[1]” She added, “What is especially troubling for most of my patients is the question of how such evil is even possible in people. It seems as if the prevailing Israeli belief in the inherent goodness of man and society’s rationalistic approach to dealing with evil were both shattered on that Saturday morning in October 2023.

Some say that in moments like these, it is best to remain silent, not to categorize or articulate, and to let things sink in before committing to scholarly definitions. Words, especially when well-articulated and polished, can diminish the magnitude of an experienced reality. We respect this sentiment, but we also understand that as mental health professionals, we would be doing a disservice by not trying to create a conceptual roadmap to navigate these turbulent times. It is true, however, that a roadmap hastily drawn will naturally be imperfect and will undoubtedly require many touch-ups. Yet, there is nothing more dreadful than wandering in unfamiliar territory, surrounded by uncompromising elements, without a goal or a path leading somewhere. A situation in which an individual, let alone an entire society, cannot cope with the evil unveiled before them is called chaos, and it is an integral part of the trauma — perhaps even its very essence[2].

In the article ahead, we will attempt to lay out our preliminary roadmap. We will start by describing the psycho-philosophical crisis that has been forced upon us as a modern society. After that, we will examine the works of some pioneers of Western psychology who focused on the issue of human evil and its progression, We will also touch on some of the issues arising from their theories. In response, we will present the unique perspective of Jewish psychology, which draws inspiration from both Jewish and Western sources.

We will then discuss the importance of culture and its capacity to impact individual development. We will look into how Jewish psychology can help us better understand radical Islam and its supposed inclination towards death and destruction. Finally, we will explore how we can confront this culture through uncompromising fighting, while simultaneously maintaining our fundamental faith in the inherent goodness of humanity and its cultures, and with genuine hope for the option of future dialogue.

Prologue: Confronting the Devil in Our Backyard

When the forthcoming commission of inquiry begins to investigate the events leading to the massacre, it is reasonable to expect that it will examine the roles of military and political leadership in these events. The commission will also likely investigate how intelligence was gathered, processed, and disseminated, and will subsequently issue its recommendations. Additionally, it is anticipated that the commission will assign responsibility to specific key figures. Psychologically, these aspects are considered part of the ‘behavioral dimension.’ Moreover, the commission will need to explore the ‘cognitive dimension’ of the tragedy: When and how did the erroneous belief emerge that Hamas was deterred from launching such an attack? Were alternative hypotheses considered? Was there an effort to verify facts that contradicted this prevailing notion?

However, there may be another dimension that this commission will overlook or at least find challenging to address: the ‘psycho-cultural dimension.’ We use this term to refer to certain ideas that Israeli society deems so outrageous that they must not even be entertained, thoughts that should remain unthinkable. Every culture has foundational assumptions that cannot be disputed; in one culture, this might involve the denial of God, while in others, it might include the prohibition of all racist thought. In Israeli society, one of these foundational taboos leading up to October 2023 was the humanistic view that humanity is, in essence, composed of ‘rational’ beings striving for the betterment of their own and their loved ones’ wellbeing. While it is true that this humanistic perspective recognizes that some individuals may be selfish and ignore aspects that do not benefit their immediate personal situation, fundamentally, it asserts that human beings do indeed strive for the overall improvement of communal or familial wellbeing. According to this view, if there is evil, it is seen as a mutation to the natural social structure, arising from distress, pain, frustration, or challenging living conditions.

It would be appropriate to liken Israeli society to the father from Goethe’s famous poem, “The Erlkönig.” There, the father rides through the forest with his son, who says, “Father, I hear the Erlkönig. He wants to take me!” The father, a staunch rationalist, assures him that there are no such things as demons, that what he hears is merely the wind in the branches, and what seems to him like the menacing eyes of the demon is nothing but the twinkling of the sun’s rays among the leaves… At the end of the poem, the father reaches the town holding his son’s dead body.

Like that father, many in Israeli society today fear (and rightfully so) the thought that reality contains forces of evil, that humans like us harbor such evil as was exposed, and even proudly ^filmed, documented, and disseminated on the morning of October 7^th.  It’s no wonder that in everyday life we try to deny its very existence and strive to ‘explain’ it in a ‘rational’ way.

“My worldview has always been that people are inherently good,” said Roni Galbafish, a writer and a lifelong leftist, describing the crisis she underwent. “However, different circumstances like wars or occupation can corrupt that… My identification with the Palestinians originates from a worldview that we are all the same, that all humans are equal, and only circumstances affect us… Faced with what we saw, I asked myself if there are cultures that hate us so deeply that they completely dehumanize us… I went back and read texts from ’67 and ’48, and even further back, from the riots of 1929, and found of the same, even before there was a state.”

And this was the insight she reached: “There are people whose life’s mission is to kill someone else. Not to be happy or to watch their children play—their jihad is the purpose of their life, and they want to kill me and my children… When people ask me ‘where is your ^humanism now?’, I can feel my internal collapse. All my life I’ve held high levels of certainty, but I realize now that my beliefs no longer serve me. I can no longer maintain the view I had regarding all human beings.”[3]

Although our worldviews differ from those of Galbafish’s, we feel for her. While she is a secular humanist, we believe that man was chosen to embody the ‘image of God’, saying that we do share one fundamental viewpoint: all three of us believe in the inherent good in the human soul, and in the persistence of an ongoing goodness, and that this goodness cannot be ignored by anyone indefinitely. It may hide or be distorted but it cannot disappear. Indeed, this notion of ours is being tested today. The eruption of absolute evil[4] that our fundamental worldview disregards in normal times has manifested into schisms that have been deeply engrained in the deepest parts of our psyches.

From the outset we plan on understanding this issue as one that is seen by a large part of Israeli society as an atrocity and an evil that is far from what we could even comprehend. This might stem from our new-found familiarity with the satanic sadism and murderous rage that we saw on live television and on social media. It may also be attributed to the inconceivable scale that points at the amount of effort that went into planning the massacre. It may be the psychotic glee the terrorists showed after killing the elderly, babies men and women showing off to their friends and family, or even the footage of their unfazed faces in the subsequent interrogations. All these come together to form an eerie reality of an evil so extreme that we can’t simply look the other way. Is it even possible for a society to unequivocally choose absolute evil in its most radical forms? How can one describe such a phenomenon?

All these together and separately amplify the anxiety and human damage in the concept of “human” that we believe in. An important part of dealing with the crisis is the need to restore our cultural conceptual framework and understand why it failed to cope with the events we encountered. We must construct coping mechanisms while in motion—and the first tool is, of course, reflective self-understanding.

Human Evil in Psychological Literature

In this context, it is impractical to explore all psychological perspectives on the nature of evil—a task so expansive that it would require not just a book, but an entire library. Instead, we will focus on the influential works of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, two foundational figures in modern psychology who delved deeply into this subject. Our discussion will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of their theories.

Freud’s perspective on evil underwent a profound transformation following the First World War. Initially, his goal was to map the psyche empirically, aiming for a purely scientific understanding of the soul’s essence. Consequently, he avoided moralistic terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ which he believed were based on subjective judgments and incompatible with his empirical objectives. For example, no chemist would claim that an acid acts with malice toward organic compounds; rather, the chemist would note that the acid simply dissolves them. Science, in Freud’s view, should be descriptive, not judgmental. Additionally, psychoanalysis seeks to sidestep language that might inadvertently provoke philosophical or moral inquiries such as “Who determines what is good?” and “Who decides what is evil?”—questions that belong more to the realms of morality and philosophy than to science. Freud was diligent in his efforts to keep these debates out of his field, focusing instead on demonstrating how every psychological phenomenon is rooted in fundamental physiological instincts.

Freud was careful to use neutral terminology, such as “psychic energy” and its repression by society, yet his theories can readily be interpreted within the frameworks of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. According to Freud, humans fundamentally strive for what might be considered good, albeit a self-centered version of good driven by the ‘pleasure principle’—the innate desire to maximize pleasure. The only check on this principle is the ‘reality principle’, which aims to avoid unnecessary suffering. These concepts form the bedrock of his theoretical structure. However, as individuals develop, society intervenes, corrupting them and bending them to its needs. It restricts their ability to seek pleasure, thus generating frustration, which it then manipulates for its own ends. While this view has been subject to criticism and many have indeed critiqued it, for the moment we can acknowledge that any notion of evil Freud discusses is inherently relative, serving either the pleasure principle or the reality principle.

Freud’s initial viewpoint underwent a dramatic transformation after the Great War, as can be seen from his seminal 1920 essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. This essay, which drew its impetus from his observations of the war—an utterly irrational, horrific war perceived often as a wholesale slaughter of a generation sent to the front by their forebears—opens with a clinical description of combat reactions. During that period, there were attempts to rationalize evil—to attribute it to national honor, military alliances, or politics. Freud dismissed these rationalizations; he recognized absolute evil as such and sought to explain its psychological origins. His claim was that there exists within us a fundamental evil, evil for the sake of evil, what he later termed the ‘death drive’.

It should be noted that when Freud wrote about the ‘death drive,’ he referred to a literal craving; the death drive means that a person yearns for death, just as they yearn for food or sexual pleasure. In fact, in the previously mentioned paper, Freud argues that the death drive is even more profound.

In other words, Freud proposed that radical evil exists within all of us. Some of his followers attempted to soften this assertion, explaining everything as manifestations of relative evil (which is, of course, far more rational). Stephen Mitchell, for example, writes that “destructiveness stems from a sense of danger and personal threat, and from revenge.”[5] He acknowledges that there are facts that seem to contradict this assumption: for example, the reality that some individuals are wholly consumed by destructiveness, pursuing it as an end in itself. “People who appear to be perpetually spiteful and capable of generating vast amounts of anger in response to the slightest provocation, or even without any provocation at all… Do not such people provide living proof of an inner impulse that drives them?” His answer is that “in such cases, one must also consider the atmosphere within these individuals’ inner world of objects, which can certainly generate a chronic sense of threat and danger.”[6] Mitchell manages to explain many forms of interpersonal aggression in this way; however, his view, like many others in its genre, collapses in the face of murderous intent, the desire for destruction for destruction’s sake, or the pleasure derived from inflicting torture and the insanity that accompanies premeditated proliferation of death as an objective, which we repeatedly see in reality.

In Freud’s post-war doctrine, a person is born with a terrible struggle between the desire for life and the lust for death. The primary task of life is to amplify the life instinct over its opponent, for if the instinct for life fails, we die. If the death drive is primary and fundamental, then it is impossible to defeat it outright. One can only repress it or project it onto someone else—to wish “let him die, and not me.” Thus, according to Freud, the death instinct becomes the aggressive instinct. We reiterate: Freud argues emphatically that the death instinct is not the prerogative of a few individuals suffering from this or that pathology. It is an integral part of the psychic structure of all of us. The fact that we do not usually feel it only shows that the death drive is more ambiguous than other desires, denied or repressed.

We could only really point at one prominent theorist that earnestly followed in Freud’s footsteps—Melanie Klein, who predicated her theory on the inevitable struggle between the forces of life and death. Building on Freud’s post-war theory, Klein posits that from the moment we are born we are torn by the immense dichotomy of the forces of love and hate. In infancy the two forces are aimed at the most basic of figures in the baby’s life—its mother. In the baby’s eyes the mother is life itself, and the relationship with her is the only path towards sustenance. Thus the mother stands in the epicenter of the infant’s emotional self: when he is feeling good and when the instinct of life prevails she is the purveyor of this good. But when the death instinct is victorious it is also attributed to the mother. There are moments in the infant’s life filled with love, joy, and goodness; at these times, the mother appears loving, grand, and admirable. Yet, there are other moments when hatred prevails, and everything feels bad, painful, and frustrating. During these times, the mother seems like a terrifying and hostile monster, and consequently, reality itself appears dreadful, frightening, and oppressive. The infant despises such a reality and longs to destroy everything—starting with himself and his mother, who, at this stage, personifies reality itself.

Klein vividly describes a destructive cycle that begins from this point: during moments of hatred, the infant feels as if something evil is living within him and must be expelled. In his fantasy, he projects this evil into his mother and fears that she will project it back onto him. This initiates a cycle of projection and counter-projection, dividing reality into absolute good and absolute evil. Klein believed the source of hatred to be internal. When the infant is in a state of hatred, even if the mother treats him well, it may only intensify his hatred. He feels she is giving him only a tiny fraction of the abundance she holds back, which further fuels his anger (a phenomenon Klein called “envy”). Klein termed this mental state the “paranoid-schizoid position.”

This perspective is evident in the tales of the Brothers Grimm, originally intended for young children, where a paranoid-schizoid stance remains dominant. In these stories, one does not find complex characters, there is no good mother who also possesses bad traits (or at least annoying ones, as every teenager can attest). Instead, the prevailing pattern is that there once was a good mother, but she disappeared and was replaced by a cruel witch (sometimes returning in the guise of a fairy godmother). Good and evil are never intermingled. Consequently, there is no mercy for the “evil” ones. Cinderella’s stepsisters bleed to death and the dwarf from “Rumpelstiltskin” is torn to pieces. In other words, at the core of personality there is a battle between absolute good and absolute evil. Thus, if someone is identified as absolutely evil, it is both possible and proper to counter them with equally absolute malice. This is the origin of cruelty, vengeance, and the desire to annihilate the enemy. There is no room for empathy, mercy, or understanding towards those identified as evil.

Klein’s exploration of the paranoid-schizoid position reveals a profound understanding of how the psyche evolves, grappling with the death instinct and, essentially, the nature of evil. Klein posits that this position, marked by a sharp dichotomy between absolute good and absolute evil, is never fully eradicated from the psyche. Instead, psychological growth is characterized not by the eradication of this initial stance but by the emergence of a new, coexisting mental stance that Klein calls the ‘depressive’ position

In the depressive position, individuals are seen in their full complexity, infused with both positive and negative attributes. This perspective acknowledges that no one is entirely good or completely evil; this nuanced view extends to oneself, one’s mother, and everyone else. The transition to this understanding can be tinged with sadness, stemming from the dismantling of the illusion of absolute goodness. This realization can be jarring for a child who sees that their mother, while often kind and nurturing, can also express anger, induce frustration, and even inflict pain. Despite the discomfort of such revelations—thus the term ‘depressive’ position—it leads to an important personal growth where the child learns that they too can display negative behaviors and still remain loved and accepted by their parents. This shift transforms the notion of radical evil into a concept of relative evil, reflecting a more mature grasp of human nature.

As the depressive position becomes more consolidated and established in the psyche, the paranoid-schizoid position becomes increasingly difficult and threatening. The depressive position facilitates life because it allows for complex thinking about reality. However, as long as the paranoid-schizoid position retains its intensity, it risks undermining the achievements of the depressive position. For example, consider a person living with a partner, recognizing that they are loved despite having many flaws. This achievement is entirely credited to the depressive position which they have successfully developed. However, as we all know, during an argument, the paranoid-schizoid position can take over, leading them to say things that should not be said or do things that should not be done.

This dynamic generates a genuine anxiety about the strengthening of the paranoid-schizoid position. The psyche copes with this anxiety through familiar mechanisms. For instance, denial: we deny the existence of evil when we encounter it. We try to forcefully bring ourselves back to a ‘rational’ place, convincing ourselves that the evil we encounter cannot be absolute evil (since absolute evil is inherently irrational, and we are unwilling to acknowledge its existence). We prefer to explain it away, to transform it in our minds into relative evil.

But this denial is not only theoretical. History shows that humans have a hard time acknowledging true evil even as they stand right in front of it. Did the Nazis not exploit the inclination to refuse belief in the utmost evil? And even today, are we not witnessing efforts to erase the atrocities that occurred in Be’eri, Re’im, and Sderot? Those who say, ‘Yes, it’s terrible, but we mustn’t forget the context’—are they not turning a blind eye to the devil?

This denial manifests itself in the efforts to explain the Palestinian desire to annihilate the Jewish state as a result of “poverty”, “occupation” or any other distresses. The comments by Gadi Yarkoni, head of the Eshkol Regional Council, underscore this psychological shift:

“Listen to how I speak. I, who addressed their basic needs, who sorted their garbage, ensured they had water and electricity. I thought—as long as they were well, so would I be. I didn’t want ‘peace’; I wanted to live side by side. Now I am convinced it is impossible. I saw who entered our homes—people with hammers, the riffraff intent on destroying us. That’s it; it’s over. We need to go through a generation or years of complete disengagement, and then maybe we will manage to freeze the hatred until it disappears. For now, it’s too overwhelming.”

Yarkoni, primarily a man of action rather than a theorist, held views that clearly regarded humans as fundamentally rational beings. He believed that if individuals were provided with the means to support themselves, they would abandon their destructive impulses and stop directing them towards others. This perspective is similar to that of intelligence officers who believed that Hamas was deterred and would not attack. Melanie Klein might have suggested to Yarkoni that improving the Palestinians’ conditions could actually heighten their envy and, consequently, their destructive desires.

Another way of denying evil is the search for a false symmetry, exemplified by the question, “True, what they did to us is horrific… but are we innocent? Do we not harbor some evil as well?” This perspective should be considered in light of the campaign against “settler violence” that gained momentum after the October 7th massacre. Beyond the narrow political reasons for this campaign, its subconscious motive seems to be an attempt to soften the horror felt by the public. In other words, it was an attempt to deny the encounter with absolute evil and to render it relative and contextual. It was an attempt to ignore that what struck us did not stem from anything we did and has no parallel in our culture; it is the rotten fruit of an ideology purely driven by a refined death drive.

The denial of evil, by the way, is not necessarily related to the inherent forgiveness in some aspects of Western culture toward the weak and oppressed. The denial also applies to the powerful. Among the horrors that psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas describes in his important article “The Structure of Evil,” he writes about a girl who fell victim to a serial killer. When she realized what was happening to her, she could only ask, “Is this real?” Even when such evil stands before us, and we are powerless, we refuse to acknowledge its truth.

Distorted Symmetry

We have briefly surveyed the perspectives of two eminent psychologists on the nature of evil. Our selection of these figures was deliberate, as both placed evil and the struggle against it at the core of their intellectual work. Both of them compel us to face the psychological realities and their associated fears, and the darker sides of ourselves and others. They elucidate our fears of reality and the psychological impulse to deny its horrors.

Yet Freud, and especially Klein, ventured further, positing a complete and utter symmetry between good and evil. Klein refers to two primal instincts that are fundamental to all psychic life, analogous to the positive and negative poles that are essential for the existence of an electric field. We contend that the symmetry outlined here is fundamentally flawed and harmful, not merely failing to confront evil but rather amplifying it and lending it legitimacy.

Although it is likely that both Freud and Klein would have rejected this assertion, their theories are certainly life philosophies. Neither can be accused of maintaining a ‘neutral’ position in the conflict between the instincts. On the contrary, it might be possible to describe Kleinian theory under the title “How the Life Instinct Escapes the Clutches of the Death Instinct.” The narrative of mutual ‘repercussions’ she describes is nothing but the story of the Life Instinct’s efforts to rid itself of the destructiveness of the oppressive Death Instinct. The treatment she advocates is based on a piercing emphasis on the role of the Death Instinct in human life—with a clear aim to assist in its release. Yet, when the theory creates symmetry between good and evil, it is hard to think of a real reason to prefer one over the other. Of course, it is possible to argue that if the Life Instinct had not triumphed over its opponent, we would simply be dead; however, this argument begs the question: it assumes that the fact that one of the instincts is necessary for our life is an argument in its favor.

This point is especially potent in light of the current crisis. As we will expand later in the article, one of the foundations of the horror is the fact that the ideological perception of Islamic zealots openly claims the moral superiority of the Death Instinct over the Life Instinct. Time and again we hear them declare that just as the West loves life and pleasure, so they love death and war. Indeed, we feel that such a mentality reflects a deep distortion of human nature, but again: if our perception creates a clear symmetrical balance between the two fundamental instincts, on what can we actually base the claim that one of them is a ‘distortion’?

From this arises a therapeutic argument. When we assume that the death drive—in essence, evil—is a fundamental element in the human psyche, it follows that there is no real way to deal with it. At most, it can be ‘managed.’ One must accept its existence as it is, without illusions of correcting it. Indeed, to the best of our understanding, this is the basic meaning of the ‘depressive position’—the emergence of the ability to deal with evil without illusions. This brings us to the perception that all we can do is ‘contain’ the evil (Klein herself, admittedly, did not speak of ‘containment,’ but it is no coincidence that her students invented the concept). There is room to fear that such a stance might discourage a serious fight against evil.

All this points to the need to seek a different perspective, one that does not forgo the strength of Freudian and Kleinian thought, while simultaneously laying the foundations for a consistent struggle for good.

Human Evil in the Light of Jewish Psychology

In the 1970s, Mordechai Rotenberg (later, a recipient of the Israel Prize in Social Work) began an effort to build an independent Jewish psychology. This psychology aimed to engage with the depths reached by modern Western psychology while incorporating insights derived from Jewish thought across generations (particularly the literature of Hasidism and Kabbalah). The foundational premise is that Jewish sources address the wide array of questions that Western psychology deals with, often touching on them from a different and enriching perspective. This perspective can make a significant contribution to therapists, educators, and anyone dealing with existential questions related to the human psyche – including, as we will soon see, the question of good and evil hidden within the soul.

Jewish psychology begins with a deep belief that the yearning for good, inherent in the human soul, is the root of all mental life. It sees the divine image in man as the deep source of every mental process and reminds us that this image is wholly good. This statement, of course, only intensifies the question with which we began: When faced with the satanic evil we have experienced, how can we believe that the source of mental life lies in the yearning for good? This is not a simple task, but even if the explanation is not perfect, it will at least create a starting point for deeper contemplation in the future.

We will explain our proposal in several stages.

1. The Yearning for Good

The foundational assumption is that mental life is an effort to express the good hidden in our deep ‘self.’ In a sense, this can be likened to physical development, which brings to fruition the deep plan hidden in our genetic pool. We are born with a deep mental template that defines ‘the good life’ for us as a life filled with love, creativity, joy, satisfaction, and various spiritual desires: a life full of good. This inner plan also defines for us what is ‘good’ – that is, we intuitively identify anything that enhances our lives as ‘good’ and anything that harms them as ‘evil’ (all of this, naturally, on a sensory level and prior to the development of language).

These things are known to every infant. He cannot yet articulate it, of course, but he knows well when it is ‘good’ and when it is ‘bad,’ and we easily recognize it: when it is good, he laughs; when it is bad, he screams. We adults say, of course, that the division is between what is ‘good for him’ and what is ‘bad for him.’ But the baby does not yet know that there are situations where something is good for him and bad for someone else, or vice versa. For him, the simple division is between what feels good and what feels bad.

2. Destructiveness

What, then, is the source of the destructive impulse? To answer, we turn to the Kabbalistic tradition. According to the teachings of the Ari, the father of late Kabbalah, the creation of the world stems from the desire of the infinite God, who is wholly absolute good (a desire that the Ari calls “Infinite Light”). However, in the infinite depths of God’s being, the roots from which evil would eventually develop were already hidden; in his words, “the roots of judgments.” These roots of judgments are not evil in themselves: they represent the power of might, the willingness to struggle and fight for the revelation of good, qualities that are an integral part of goodness. But the nature of these roots is such that they can give birth to ‘judgments,’ and thus to evil.

Many in the psychoanalytic tradition have also argued that destructiveness is inherently part of good.[7] A poignant description of this truth is found in the words of Margaret Little, a psychoanalyst who, during her therapy with Donald Winnicott, experienced a severe mental breakdown and was eventually hospitalized. During her hospitalization, she tried to participate in occupational therapy. There she found she could not draw, and tried to understand why.

“I realized that destruction itself was a form of creation, as destruction and creation are inseparable: you cannot draw a picture without destroying the white canvas and tubes of paint… because nothing lives unless something dies, and nothing dies unless something lives…”[8]

Jewish psychology, drawing from both Jewish sources and parts of the psychoanalytic tradition, holds that destructiveness is an inseparable part of creation, love, life. Therefore, it is an inseparable part of the soul, and no mental life is possible without it.[9]

3. Complexity and Contraction (Tzimtzum)

There is no doubt that a worthy life must encompass a variety of elements, including an element of destructiveness. This indicates that mental reality is constructed from a complex interplay of these elements. Mordechai Rotenberg has expressed this complexity in several ways, such as the combination of impulse and creation[10] (merging the instinctual with the spiritual) and the concept of the Pardes of the soul[11] (integrating the rational with the mystical).

Herein lies the crucial point: according to the Ari, the ‘divine light’ encompasses many elements that are meant to ultimately form a unified picture. This complete picture can only materialize if every mental force ‘contracts’—that is, agrees to manifest in a limited form. This is akin to musical harmony, which requires each instrument to be confined to its designated role in the composition. If one instrument tries to dominate the entire performance, the harmony is destroyed.

However, this contraction is not natural to our mental forces. In practice, each of them strives to express the good inherent in it fully and infinitely. A small child cannot curb his desire with any ‘rational argument’ (“Honey, this is really unhealthy”…), because at the beginning of life, every desire aspires to full realization, and we have no ability to contract or compromise it.

In the language of Kabbalah, it is said that every force claims, “I will rule,” and thus the complete picture ‘breaks.’ Reality becomes fragmented, and man’s role is to discover the points of hidden good among the shards; in the language of the Ari, “to raise the sparks.” Unrestrained satisfaction of desires leaves no room for spiritual pursuits, while immersion in mysticism neglects practical actions. Each mental force must learn to contract. It’s noteworthy that the necessity of contraction is one of the foundations of Rotenberg’s teachings, starting with his first book ‘Dialogue with Deviance: The Hasidic Ethic and the Theory of Social Contraction.’[12]

This pattern of ‘all or nothing’ is called in Hasidism the breaking of the vessels, which turns the different mental forces into ‘evil.’ Love and creation, belonging and individuation, and many other forces become destructive. The breaking of the vessels turns the power of destruction, which we learned to recognize as part of the good, into absolute evil. We desire to destroy all existing good, and especially (as Klein taught) the object upon which this desire is projected. We feel that reality is hostile to us and thus wants to destroy us – therefore it is evil, and we must annihilate it entirely. We want to destroy the evil – and anything that does not submit to our will is undoubtedly pure evil.

We often see this in psychotic states. For example, I remember (B.K.) a patient who, in his youth, suffered a psychotic episode and was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital. When one of his classmates visited him in the hospital, she was shocked by his severe pessimism, and tried – somewhat awkwardly – to show him that despite all his pain, there was much good in reality. “Look,” she said to him, “the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming.” When he told me about it, many years later, he said: “If I could, I would uproot the flowers and extinguish the sun.” The good his friend tried to show him only angered him. The focus is not on the desire to die but on the desire to destroy the obstacles that block the appearance of life.

Another patient often talked about her desire to die. Finally, I asked her to explain to me what she thinks about when she says death. She thought, and then said in amazement: “Actually, I imagine that everything around me dies, but I continue.” I can recount many such encounters with many patients.

Thus we see that the Jewish psychological approach to human evil draws inspiration from many sources in Judaism dealing with this issue. We briefly mentioned some of them. We will illustrate how this approach appears in another significant source: the sin of the first man. The Torah describes human life before the sin as a paradise and tells us that eating from the fruit of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” brought death into the world along with the “curses” that constantly torment us – from the hardships of livelihood to the pain of childbirth.

What makes the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” so terrible? And what is the role of the “tree of life” mentioned alongside it? Why was it forbidden at all? These questions have received countless answers in the interpretive tradition. Different thinkers incorporated their general views on the relationship between good and evil into their interpretations. We will briefly quote a passage from the Zohar on the subject, which establishes one of the Kabbalistic approaches to it:

“Of every tree of the garden, you may freely eat” (Genesis 2:16). He allowed him to eat them all… But this tree (the tree of knowledge of good and evil) is the tree of death… Whoever takes it alone dies, for he has taken the poison of death, for it separates him from life. Therefore, “for on the day you eat from it you will surely die” because it separated the plants.

In this passage, the ‘tree of life’ appears as the foundation of all reality and mental vitality, encompassing the ‘tree of knowledge.’ This can be interpreted as indicating that we possess a unique mental power intended to be an inseparable part of the drive for life, but which can also become detached from it. When this detachment occurs, it is transformed into a death drive, from which the evil in our souls and the world originates. Our primary goal in life, therefore, is to ground our existence in the drive for life and to assert this drive over the death drive.

In this spirit, the ‘Sfat Emet’ (Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh Leib Alter of Gur) and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook wrote:

“It seems that the tree of knowledge was certainly created to be eaten from. But Adam ate it out of time and was not allowed to eat from it, for it was only prepared for the recipients of the Torah, who could clarify the good and the waste. Before Adam had the power of the tree of life, he was not allowed to eat from the tree of knowledge.[13]

And if he is prepared for it, even if he ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, after he passes through many trials that he undergoes, and his impurity is purified, his mind is refined, his qualities are corrected, and the recognition of the tree of life returns to connect with him. Then the tree of knowledge of good and evil will turn into a tree full of life and entirely good.”[14]

Rav Kook is considered by many as a “harmonist” who excels in describing the good in man and does not relate to the harsh sides of reality.[15] But these things did not prevent him from writing about the evil inherent in us:

From his youth, the inclination of man’s heart is evil. He desires wonders, to delve into wickedness, to perpetrate terrible acts that destroy, sadden, confuse, and darken. And a kind of satisfaction of the action, of ruling and dominating, grows from this. Wickedness makes wings for itself and grows in the heart, in the depths of the soul, and in the depths of reality.[16]

Here it speaks—in the terms we used in this essay—of absolute evil. Wickedness seeks nothing but the pleasure of wickedness itself; and perhaps it is worth noting that this passage was written long before World War I, after which Freud wrote his essay. Subsequently, during the same war, parallel to Freud and before the publication of his seminal essay, Rav Kook writes that there is in us “absolute evil, desiring the destruction of the entire world “[17] – that is, here Rav Kook speaks of a death drive in every sense, almost in Freud’s terms.

At this point, we have closed the circle: we began with a fundamental assumption that is opposite to the position we presented in the name of Freud and Klein. We assumed that the source of destructiveness lies in the drive for life. It is precisely this insight, combined with the dynamic that turns destructiveness into an absolute, that led us to understand the absolute evil hidden in all of us, at least as a potential. This evil is filled with hatred for every spark of life—an evil that grows more enraged with any chance for life, love, or joy. This insight is strikingly similar to that of Freud and Klein.

Evil and the Dialogical Stance

Despite the similarities, a different starting point inevitably leads to different conclusions—and, in our view, to a different and more optimistic therapeutic approach that strives to rectify evil by integrating it into a creative and dialogical process. As previously argued, Klein’s premise necessitates accepting evil as a given. The starting point we propose here allows for contemplating a different mental stance that looks for the hidden good within the depths of evil. This stance does not aim to eradicate evil (as in the paranoid-schizoid position) nor to live alongside it with rational ‘tolerance’ (as in the depressive position), but rather to search for and find the hidden good within it, since even absolute evil originally originates from good. We call this stance “dialogical,” because what is dialogue if not an effort to create a connection with the rich, deep, and good mystery hidden in our partner in conversation!

An example from my clinical experience (B.K.): A patient dreamt he found a baby in a trash can. In the dream, he was filled with murderous rage and tried to find a club to kill the baby, but then heard people yelling: “His mother is here.” He panicked and ran away. In our session, I tried to give space to his murderous rage, to hear its destructive voice, and to understand the patient’s terror in the face of this rage. He easily agreed that the baby was himself, but immediately turned to self-condemnation: “How messed up am I!” I suggested we listen to the rage differently and try to understand why it wanted to kill the baby. Feelings emerged such as “My messed-up nature ruins every opportunity for me… If only I could get rid of myself…”. Hence, the inevitable question is—what would you want to do or be if you could “get rid of yourself”? Which part of yourself do you want to “kill”? What is wrong with that part? All these questions emerged during the therapy (though not necessarily in these exact words), with the underlying theoretical assumption being precisely what I have just explained: that there indeed exists an authentic desire to eliminate part of himself. The root of this self-loathing is actually a desire for life, which refuses to accept the life he has been allowed so far due to a long history of various injuries, both as a victim and as a perpetrator.

In my opinion, there was no chance of progress in therapy without addressing the evil he experienced (and the evil he committed) clearly, while at the same time remaining empathetic and accepting regarding the psychological source of this evil. The murderous rage in the dream was genuinely part of a desire to create something new, expressing the hidden good in his soul.

This example highlights the necessity of viewing evil simultaneously from two separate perspectives: acknowledging it as it is, without illusions, while also seeing it as a distortion of a deep yearning for good and striving to connect it to constructive and creative mental realms (This is not always possible, of course, but it is the therapeutic direction). It is important to emphasize—we can assume that most people in normative society are primarily driven by the life instinct. However, if we look closely, we will also find elements of despair, existential disgust, and destructiveness. Conversely, it is plausible that there are societies where most people are primarily driven by death instincts, yet they are deeply concerned for their lives, firmly claiming that their world is the “true life” and fearing the “monstrosity” of their enemies. We will return to this when we discuss the cultural issue.

But first, we must address a common question: when we ‘explain’ the emergence of absolute evil, aren’t we essentially legitimizing it? If universal mental foundations include a desire for destruction, and human life experiences determine how one deals with this impulse, how can we blame someone whose destructive instinct has grown to monstrous proportions? In essence, haven’t we made absolute evil relative by explaining it?

This question hinges on another: what determines how we confront the evil within us? True,  much depends on an individual’s experiences, starting from childhood. However, much also depends on the individual themselves. We have a capacity for choice, which we have scarcely touched upon until now—the ability to choose between different ways of dealing with evil: the paranoid-schizoid, the depressive, and the dialogical.

From the beginning of life, there is an ‘I’ that, though initially weak and overwhelmed by various stimuli, both good and bad. Some stimuli evoke faith in life, happiness, and the future, while others evoke despair, destructiveness, and a yearning for death. Early on, this ‘I’ deals with bad stimuli in a paranoid-schizoid manner because it has not yet learned to cope differently. It divides reality into absolute states of good and evil. Later, it learns more developed ways to deal with evil: the depressive way and the dialogical way. The choice is not easy: as every psychologist knows, entrenched mental patterns prove highly resistant to change, and those who attempt to confront these ingrained consequences may find themselves the object of challenging projections. Ultimately, we all tend to project our inner evil: one person projects it onto their spouse, children, or parents, another onto their political opponents, and so forth. Yet, it is essential to remember that we have the capacity for choice.

The Cultural Question

We began this essay with the shock that gripped us all in the wake of the events of Simchat Torah 5784. We presented the psychological basis for denying the absolute evil we must confront. However, so far, we have mainly discussed this on an individual level. As previously noted, the extraordinary nature of the Simchat Torah events is precisely that they do not reflect the evil of a “lone attacker”—radical as it may be but still attributable to an individual—but rather a horrific evil that has gripped an entire society whose culture encourages these terrible acts. What is the significance of the dialogical approach in such a situation?

To answer this, we need to add another dimension to the proposed thought process: an anthropological dimension (perhaps more accurately called ‘psycho-anthropological’ or ‘psycho-historical,’ as I referred to it in my book ‘Zeus, Prometheus, and God’ B.K).

Before diving into the issue, we should address one of the deeper obstacles in understanding the cultural situation we are dealing with. That is,  it is not easy for us to attribute any qualities (mainly, of course, negative ones) to an entire culture. We fear—and rightly so—sliding into racism, unfounded generalizations, and hatred of the other. Moreover, every generalization we think of immediately runs into several counterexamples. Consequently, we struggle to factor the other’s culture into our considerations. Even when dealing with a clear enemy, when we try to analyze their motivations, we tend to put ourselves in their shoes and think about what we would do in their place. This thought process resulted in the Israeli intelligence assertion that Hamas is deterred. This was not unfounded: indeed, it is difficult for us to think that a sane person would not be deterred in such a situation—at least, not the kind of people we know; and the very idea that we are dealing with a different kind of people sounds racist, doesn’t it?

It is not difficult to show that this line of thinking led to Israel’s institutional failure of Simchat Torah. In a fascinating article published in Haaretz in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, several leading Middle Eastern scholars were interviewed about the proper attitude toward Hamas. One of them, Professor Avraham Sela, said in the interview: “I spent 16 years in the intelligence branch; today, I am in academia, and I can bring the voice of reason. No revenge. No victory. Now we need to speak rationally. Even when our blood is boiling, and it is boiling.” “The claim that the Arabs’ position is something in their DNA, in my opinion, is nonsense,” he added. “In the end, we are dealing with human beings.”[18]

We can agree with Professor Sela that we should not seek the root of evil in Arab DNA in any biological sense. But it is fascinating that he describes only two possible understandings: one is racist (a different DNA from ours), and the other denies any difference between the Gazan Arabs and any other human being. There is no mention of the possibility that although there is no genetic difference between human groups, there are significant cultural differences shaping their world. He does not consider Erich Fromm’s simple assertion: “There are sadistic people and sadistic cultures, but there are also non-sadistic people and non-sadistic cultures.”[19]

To address this, we need to touch on the meaning of culture and use the formulations of Clifford Geertz, who, in stark contrast to the thought process described earlier, argues that our emotional world is not a basic given, but quite the opposite: it is entirely shaped by our culture (which suggests that people from different cultures will react to the same reality in different and opposite ways). He writes:

“We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture—and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it: Dobuan and Javanese, Hopi and Italian, upper-class and lower-class, academic and commercial. Man’s great capacity for learning, his plasticity, has often been remarked, but what is even more critical is his extreme dependence upon a certain sort of learning: the attainment of concepts, the apprehension and application of specific systems of symbolic meaning” [20]

These words open the possibility of thinking about radical differences between people raised in different cultures. What seems self-evident in one culture may appear utterly absurd in another.

In other words: Yes, we are all made from the same material. There are no “different kinds” of people. But the innate data are merely raw materials of inclinations, faculties, and impulses—shaped by culture into a unique form. The very need to actualize the impulses within us places us before difficult dilemmas and each culture offers its solutions to these same dilemmas. We can mention here a series of universal dilemmas that are part of human nature—the Oedipus complex, the construction of the ‘self,’ For example, the Oedipal stage in a patriarchal world is not the same as in a world where personal development is paramount. Culture does not just ‘offer’ a solution; it educates and reinforces it in various ways: myths, rituals, behaviors. All these color the mental world of the people of that culture and create a unique cultural character that all members of that culture share in different ways. Among other things, each culture shapes its members’ relationship between the life and death instincts.

It can be seen that there are cultures—like individuals—that use mechanisms of the ‘paranoid-schizoid position,’ others that use ‘depressive’ mental mechanisms, or dialogical mechanisms; there are cultures based on the life instinct and others on the death instinct. These can be called cultures of love and cultures of hate, though we must remember that all archetypes exist in every individual. There is no person without a life instinct, and no person who does not have to deal with the death instinct. Thus, one can talk about a ‘culture of life’ and love only if it also addresses the death instinct. Similarly, there cannot be a pure culture of hate and death. The question must be more complex: What roles do the instincts of life and death play within a particular culture, and how are they combined to shape that culture?

Dar al-Harb

As Dr. Ephraim Herrera, a researcher of Jihad, shows that from its inception, Islam has sought to conquer the entire world. Every place that is not yet ‘Dar al-Islam’ (‘House of Islam’), that is, not yet under Muslim control, is called ‘Dar al-Harb’—the ‘House of War,’ which must be returned to Islamic rule. A Muslim thinker explains: “The Prophet Muhammad emphasized that this religion will dominate the world, whether people like it or not. Because it is the religion of Allah.”[21] These statements immediately evoke the dichotomous worldview described by Klein. We can add Klein’s definition of envy, a state where any creativity seen in others arouses deep-seated hatred,[22] and compare it to the fascinating words of Sayyid Qutb, one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was asked if Western science should also be destroyed. He replied: “Certainly… and in any case, we cannot excel in science. We will always lag in this field, even if we put in tremendous effort.” [23]It seems as though he read Klein’s words and applied them precisely.

But the central point is, nevertheless, the sanctification of death. As we know, in war people are killed. This fact is not unique to Islam, but in most religions and ideologies, death in battle is seen as a necessary evil. only after being mortally wounded did he say the famous phrase, to console himself that his death would have deep meaning. In contrast, Islam prides itself on the idealization of death, seeing it as a lofty ideal in its own right. As the mother of one of the suicide bombers said to her son: “Allah bless you with success, and may you die a martyr’s death that you deserve.”[24]

Has anyone heard of a Jewish, American, British, or any other Western mother sending her son to battle wishing him a hero’s death? It is fascinating to see that similar statements were made at the very beginning of Islamic history. For instance, Khalid ibn al-Walid, an early Muslim commander, said: “The people with me love war and death as you love pleasures and life.”[25] Such statements are taught in schools and memorized by children from a very early age. As stated in a Syrian grammar book (for ninth grade): “How hard it is not to end the Jihad in martyrdom, how cruel to be prevented from martyrdom.”[26]

These statements express a culture based on the death instinct, where death becomes an esteemed ideal – provided that the suicide bomber takes as many infidels as possible on his final journey.[27] Facing this culture of death, Westerners strive to close their eyes. Refusing to believe in such a phenomenon, they try to find excuses: these must be people whose souls have been broken by debilitating poverty or who have not had a supportive family… Yet Herrera presents facts that refute these explanations: most suicide bombers are educated, and “about a third of the suicide bombers were students or university graduates.”[28] Osama bin Laden was a graduate in economics and business administration from Jeddah University, and his deputy was a physician from a well-to-do Egyptian family.[29] One leader of the Muslim Jihad in Gaza put it this way: “If there were a one in a thousand chance that the chosen person for the mission had suicidal tendencies, we would not allow him to carry out such an operation.”[30]

This is a culture that encourages intense hatred towards anyone defined as an infidel and refuses to accept any human emotion like compassion or empathy towards them. It is a paranoid-schizoid culture based on hatred and death. Since our a priori assumption is that the life instinct exists and cannot be eradicated, we are not surprised to find it there, too, even magnified, but it is entirely disconnected from the death instinct. Islam divides these two instincts into two worlds in the simplest sense of the word. For Islam, this world is meant for war and death, while the next world is entirely life.

Professor Rotenberg dedicated an entire book to this phenomenon, explaining the role of death in different cultures. He argues that understanding the place of the “afterlife” in a particular culture can be an excellent key to understanding its mental world. He presents fascinating quotes from Muhammad about the afterlife: “The pious will dwell in a safe place among gardens and streams of water, wearing silk and velvet, facing each other. Thus they will be paired with pure maidens and beauties. The chosen ones ‘come to their wives… with an unwearied desire, with a virile member that does not cease.’[31] It is easy to see how the world is divided, as is customary in the paranoid-schizoid position, into two different worlds—one entirely death and war, the other entirely life and pleasure.

Essentially, this is a double projection: life is entirely projected onto the afterlife, and only the faithful Muslims achieve it. Islam condemns all infidels to eternal hell. Moreover, the lack of empathy for those infidels is nothing short of horrifying. For instance, one of Muhammad’s men described a murder he committed and Muhammad’s reaction:

“He lay down beside me and, raising his voice, began to sing: I will not be a Muslim as long as I live, nor will I listen to their religion. I said to myself: You’ll see! As soon as he fell asleep and snored, I got up and killed him in the most terrible way anyone has ever been killed. I stuck the end of my bow into his healthy eye and pressed it until it came out behind his neck. Then I went out like a beast of prey… Two men from Mecca who were sent to spy on the Messenger [=Muhammad] appeared; I called on them to surrender, and when they refused, I killed one and the other surrendered. I tied him up and brought him to the Messenger… I tied the prisoner’s big toes with my bowstring, and when the Prophet saw him, he laughed so that his molars were visible. He asked for news, and when I told him what had happened, he blessed me.”[32]

In our view, those who see this as the source of the horrors of October 7 are not mistaken. Muhammad’s life, no less than his words in the Quran, are models for emulation by Islam’s followers. In this context, it is fascinating to read Rav Kook’s explanation that Islam’s redemption will occur when Muslims manage to free themselves from their prophet’s example and evolve beyond it—whether by giving a moderating interpretation to his behavior or in any other way.[33] Ultimately, this will be a religion very different from the one we know.

We must not forget that Islam contains different shades. Bernard Lewis, one of its foremost scholars, reminds us of this complexity:

“The religion of Islam… taught people of different races to live in brotherhood, and people of different faiths to live alongside each other in a commendable tolerance. It was a source of inspiration for a splendid culture, within which even non-Muslims lived lives of creativity and benefit, enriching the entire world with their achievements. But the religion of Islam, like other religions, has also known times when it inspired its adherents to hatred and violence.”[34]

Today, it is hard to argue with the latter fact, and hard to remember the former. But we must keep in mind that while today’s Muslim murderousness is not accidental, and although it develops a deep and ancient foundation in Islam,[35] it is not the only foundation.

Open Eyes, Open Heart

On a practical and political level, this means, first and foremost, a refusal to turn a blind eye—whether consciously or unconsciously. We must recognize reality as it is: it is impossible to understand the behavior of radical Islamists by using the same methods we use to understand ourselves. Difficult as it may be to say, these are people whose culture has distorted their worldview and built it upon the death instinct. We must believe them when they say that their love of death is akin to our love of life; they mean it literally. We should not rationalize their statements by giving them a ‘rational’ (i.e., rational in our terms) interpretation. As we noted earlier, those who say “Hamas is deterred” imply that they themselves, if in a similar situation, would undoubtedly be deterred. Therefore, there is no room for compromise or negotiation with radical Islamists. Negotiation assumes a common ground between the two sides. Unfortunately, this common ground does not exist.

At first glance, this may seem like a rather bleak conclusion—but there is also an alternative perspective.

We have seen that both instincts ultimately stem from a common source, which is the source of life. We have also seen that despite the fundamental difference between the life instincts (upon which our culture is built) and the death instincts (upon which the culture of radical Islamists is built), both modes of experience are archetypal, meaning they exist in every individual: Jew, Westerner, or Muslim. In any case, the Muslim culture cannot eradicate the life instinct. It can only create the illusion that they will achieve full satisfaction in another world. Some members of Muslim culture internalize this, but certainly not all.

However, as we saw in the previous chapter, Islam can also move in other directions. To foster this choice, which will open the door to fruitful dialogue, we must face the evil in the radical Islam before us and fight it to the end. Only then, perhaps, will the strength of those within Islam who seek a path from a culture of death to a culture of life prevail.

This essay was translated by Eitan Wachspress and edited by Jackie Goldman

[1]For more on the difficulty faced by therapists, see the words of educational psychologist Israel Vered: “Someone senior in the burial world, a person who saw the most terrible sights and buried hundreds of bodies with his own hands, met a professional in the therapeutic field. He began to tell him what he had been through, and the therapist simply broke down in tears. ‘I had to calm him down and tell him everything would be alright,’ he told me.” Matan Hasidim, “The War for the Soul,” Makor Rishon, 13.1.24.

[2]Trauma is characterized not only by the revelation of incomprehensible evil but also by a deep sense of helplessness and shock in the face of the traumatic experience. See “Dr. Yair Caspi and Aharon Darmon – How God’s Demand Helps in Coping with Post-Trauma? | Ruach HaZman 2,” (available on YouTube), especially minutes 09:15–21:29.

[3]Gefen, P. (2023). “‘אז לא רציתי להקשיב לכם’: ההתפכחות של הסופרת רוני גלבפיש” [‘So I Didn’t Want to Listen to You’: The Awakening of Author Roni Galbfish], Makor Rishon, 1.11.23.

[4]We use the term ‘absolute’ or ‘radical’ evil with awareness that some may view this concept as subjective. Different people may indeed see different forms of evil as ‘absolute’. It is not easy to precisely define where the boundary lies between relative and radical evil, but we cannot delve into this philosophical issue here.

[5]Mitchell, S. (2003). תקווה ופחד בפסיכואנליזה[Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis] (trans. O. Zilberstein). Tel Aviv: Tola’at Sfarim. p. 214.

Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7]For more on the relation to destructiveness and death as part of life, see: Kübler-Ross, E. (2002). המוות חשוב לחיים[Death is of Vital Importance] (trans. Y. Bar-Kochva). Jerusalem: Keter.

[8]Little, M. (2004). חרדות פסיכוטיות והכלה: דיווח אישי על אנליזה אצל ויניקוט[Psychotic Anxieties and Containment: Personal Report on Analysis with Winnicott] (trans. S. Bouskowitz). Tel Aviv: Tola’at Sfarim. p. 64.

[9]Winnicott adds his own nuance to this. He argues that all love contains an element of destructiveness: love itself strives to make the beloved a part of us, essentially destroying their unique identity. However, at a certain point in our development, we understand that the other is precious and important precisely as an independent subject. Therefore, in every relationship of love, there is a frightening element since the destructiveness within us is terrifying. It could destroy the person we love, and this fear scares us most of all. Hence, Winnicott explains, we can only love someone who can withstand our destructiveness: “Primary appetitive love can be cruel, harmful, and dangerous… [the baby] does not allow himself to be too dangerous, but to some extent, he frustrates himself, and therefore he necessarily hates some part of himself unless he finds an external person who frustrates him and bears his being hated.” Winnicott, D. W. (2014). חסך ועבריינות[Deprivation and Delinquency] (trans. R. Haimovich). Tel Aviv: Tolaat Sfarim. p. 177.

[10]Rotenberg, M. (1999). ספר היצר[The Book of the Instinct]. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken.

[11]Rotenberg, M. (1996). פרדס הנפש[The Orchard of the Soul]. Jerusalem: Academon.

[12][12]Rotenberg, M. (1990). קיום בסוד צמצום[Existence in the Secret of Contraction]. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute.

[13]Sfat Emet (1894). שמות, דרשה לפורים, ד”ה “הענין” [Exodus, Sermon for Purim, D.H. “The Matter”].

[14]Kook,  A. I. (1999). שמונה קבצים, קובץ ב’, פסקה שט”ז[Eight Collections, Collection 2, Paragraph 316]. Jerusalem.

[15]For this reason, some give up in advance on in-depth study seeking to find a system and method in Rabbi Kook’s writings or claim that the rabbi matched his modern era, and today it has become less relevant. For example, see the words of Rabbi Ilai Ofran in his book לנבוכי העולם החדש[For the Perplexed of the New World], Tel Aviv: Yedioth Books, 2022.

[16]Kook,  A. I. (1999). שמונה קבצים, קובץ א’, פסקה קעב[Eight Collections, Collection 1, Paragraph 172]

[17]Ibid., Collection 6, Paragraph 279.

[18]Bar-On, D. (2023, October 19). “האם חמאס באמת זהה לדאעש? שיחות עם 12 מומחים שחקרו את התנועה” [“Is Hamas Really the Same as ISIS? Conversations with 12 Experts Who Studied the Movement”], Haaretz.

[19]Fromm, E. (1983). האנטומיה של הרסנות האדם[The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness] (trans. R. Ankorion). Tel Aviv: Elhanan Rubinstein. p. 190.

[20]Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures (p. 49). Basic Books.

[21]Herrera, E., & Kressel, G. (2009). ג’יהאד: בין הלכה למעשה[Jihad: Theory and Practice]. Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense and Kinneret Zmora-Bitan. p. 39.

[22]Klein, M. (2005). כתבים נבחרים, א[Selected Writings, Vol. 1] (trans. O. Zilberstein). Tel Aviv: Tolaat Sfarim. p. 169.

[23]Sivan, E. (2002). התנגשות בתוך האסלאם[The Clash Within Islam]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. p. 65.

[24]Herrera, E., & Kressel, G. (2009). ג’יהאד: בין הלכה למעשה[Jihad: Theory and Practice]. Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense and Kinneret Zmora-Bitan. p. 3

[25]Ibid., p. 102.

[26]Ibid., p. 151.

[27]On the increased focus on eschatological prophecies in Sunni Islam and their connection to terrorism and religious fundamentalism, see McCants, W. (2015). סוף העולם על פי דאעש: חזון אחרית הימים של ארגון המדינה האסלאמית[The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State] (trans. A. Shor). Kiryat Gat: Dani Books. On the importance of the war against the Jews in the end times according to these traditions, see ibid., pp. 199–202, 229.

[28]Herrera, E., & Kressel, G. (2009). ג’יהאד: בין הלכה למעשה[Jihad: Theory and Practice]. Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense and Kinneret Zmora-Bitan. p. 139.

[29]Ibid., p. 137.

[30]Ibid., p. 141.

[31]Rotenberg, M. (2008). על החיים והאלמוות: דימויי גן עדן כמעצבי התנהגות: נצרות, אסלאם, יהדות[On Life and Immortality: Eden Imagery as Behavior Shaping: Christianity, Islam, Judaism]. Jerusalem: Reuven Mass. pp. 93, 95. The reference is Surah 44 in the Quran.

[32]Ibn Ishaq. (1996). Sirat Rasul Allah, The Life of Muhammad (trans. A. Guillaume). Oxford University Press. pp. 674-675.

[33]Kook, R. A. I. (2008). פנקסי ראי”ה, כרך א[The Notebooks of Rav Kook, Vol. 1]. Jerusalem: Rav Kook Institute. Rishon LeTzion, Section 115, p. 280.

[34]Lewis, B. (2006). משבר האסלאם: ממלחמה מקודשת לטרור רצחני[The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror] (trans. M. Arbel). Tel Aviv: Dvir. p. 53.

[35]“At times, jihad is presented as the Muslim equivalent of the Crusade, and both are seen as equivalent. This comparison is true in a sense—both are declared and conducted as holy wars for the true faith against an infidel enemy—but there is still a difference. The Crusade is a late development in the history of Christianity and, in some sense, symbolizes an extreme departure from the Christian values as expressed in the New Testament… In contrast, jihad has existed since the early days of Islam—in the scriptures, in the life of the Prophet, and in the practice of his first companions and successors. It continued throughout history, and even today it continues to hold a fascination” (Lewis, משבר האסלאם[The Crisis of Islam]—cited in Nir Manussi’s article “האלימות הדתית לסוגיה” [“Religious Violence in Its Various Forms”], Hashiloach 35, Kislev 5784).

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